Weather Eye

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November 1, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

“Then followed that beautiful season,

Called by the pious Arcadian peasants the summer of All Saints.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Evangeline

Today is All Saints’ summer or All Hallowe’en summer. In English folklore, the eve of Hallowe’en Summer was supposed to be the start of an unseasonably warm spell of weather, often brought by a ridge of high pressure built up from the Azores, bringing fine, sunny conditions. This made a welcome break from the often cyclonic conditions of October, when depressions burst in off the Atlantic with furious winds and rains.

These days, All Hallowe’en Summer is best known by its shortened title, Hallowe’en. So how did a pleasant bout of weather become taken over by witches, ghouls and pumpkins? Hallowe’en comes from the Celtic festival of Samhain (pronounced “Sow-en”), the close of the summer harvest and the beginning of winter, when Druids called on the spirits and divined the weather and fortunes for the following year.

As the cold of winter was arriving, many thought that the boundaries between the living and spirit world vanished and that those who had died in the past year returned to possess the living before going on to the afterlife. Tradition held that they could be warded off by carving a grotesque face into a turnip and putting a candle in it — the origins of pumpkins.

Link to Weather Eye source

[highcliffe2]

November 2, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

November has tiptoed in on a quiet note and promises a change from last month’s atrocious winds and rains, at least for the time being, but does it give any clues about the coming winter?

This time of year is rich in weather folklore, from times when skies were read for long-range forecasts.

“On the first of November, if the weather hold clear, An end of wheat sowing do make for the year.”

Clear skies now are often delivered by high-pressure systems, when days are sunny but the lack of clouds allows heat to escape into space at night and makes cold, frosty conditions.

However, hard frosts now rarely last long and by December the weather can easily turn to mild westerly winds and rain:

“If there’s ice in November that will bear a duck, There’ll be nothing after but sludge and muck.”

In the days of sailing ships, this was the time of year that winds were watched with some fear:

“November take flail, Let ships no more sail.”

November winds often warned merchant shipping and the Royal Navy to scurry home into safe harbours for the winter. In fact, the great storm of November 1703 devastated so many ships jostling into home ports before winter that 10,000 sailors were reckoned to have been killed as vessels sank.

Link to Weather Eye source

[Methuselah]

Tradition held that they could be warded off by carving a grotesque face into a turnip and putting a candle in it — the origins of...

Graham Taylor?

[P.K.]

Tradition held that they could be warded off by carving a grotesque face into a turnip and putting a candle in it — the origins of...

Graham Taylor? :lol:

:roll: :roll: :roll:

:evil: :evil: :evil:

http://www.hertsmuseums.org.uk/watford/goa...ges/launch3.jpg

[kold weather]

Graham Taylor!!!!! :roll:

[highcliffe2]

November 4, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

ONE of the strangest stories of the world’s changing climate is in Iceland. A run of warm summers and mild winters there has melted a glacier and revealed a Second World War British bomber embedded in ice.

The Fairey Battle bomber crashed shortly after take-off in fog on May 26, 1941, and plunged into deep snow, which buried the aircraft and its four-man crew. Eventually, over the years, the wreck became entombed in ice as it was swallowed up into the glacier beneath.

A few years ago, an expedition discovered the first signs of the wreck sticking up out of the glacier. The icy conditions had deep-frozen the wreck and preserved the remains of the bodies, some of their clothes, and even cans of corned beef, boot polish, a wallet and a toothbrush, as well as the aircraft itself.

The bodies were buried at a war grave cemetery, attended by relatives of the dead men.

Since then a series of warm summers and mild winters have exposed far more of the wreck. This year was exceptional as the temperature soared to new heights, with Reykjavik hitting a record breaking 25C (77F) during a heatwave in August.

Thanks to the spectacular run of weather, some three metres (10ft) of ice has melted off the glacier’s surface this year and now exposed the aircraft’s Rolls-Royce Merlin engine.

Link to Weather Eye source

[highcliffe2]

Novebmer 5, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

BONFIRE Night could be a dry night, delivered on a large high-pressure system anchored over the UK. But the clear skies and calm air may bring their own problems as the whiz, bang and smoke of thousands of firework displays leave behind a trail of air pollution.

Bonfires and fireworks give off smoke particles and noxious gases, and although they usually get blown away, there is a chance that the calm conditions could trap the pollution in cool air held close to the ground under a lid of warmer air — a temperature inversion. The list of pollutants includes dioxins, nitrogen oxides, ozone, sulphur dioxide and tiny soot particles called PM10s — these can be breathed deep into the lungs and are thought to trigger asthma, bronchitis and many other problems.

In some ways this is reminiscent of an old-fashioned peasouper smog, when coal smoke created a choking blanket of soot and sulphur with the acidity of a car battery.

London bore some of the worst smogs because it lies in a shallow basin, where air pollution can stew under a temperature inversion. In December 1952, a week of smog grew so dense that it remained dark all day, and tons of airborne soot and acid were reckoned to have killed 12,000 people — a disaster which led to the Clean Air Act banning dirty coal fires in cities.

Link to Weather Eye source

[highcliffe2]

November 6, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

MANY animals have remarkable powers of weather forecasting, but possibly one of the strangest of all is the medicinal leech.

This humble, but rather unloved, creature was made famous for its weather predictions in the mid-1800s by the aptly named George Merryweather of Whitby, Yorkshire.

As he applied the animals to his patients, Merryweather saw that the leeches became excited before thunderstorms, something that had been previously noted by Edward Jenner, the inventor of the smallpox vaccine, who wrote: “The leech disturbed is newly risen quite to the summit of his prison.”

It was Dr Merryweather’s genius to invent “The Tempest Prognosticator”, a special jar for leeches to perform their forecasting.

As a storm approached, the leeches unfailingly climbed up the jar from a pool of water and entered a narrow brass tube at the top.

There they dislodged a hammer which rang a central bell — the more leeches that rang the bell, the more likely a storm was brewing.

Indeed, the leeches were unerringly accurate and Merryweather displayed them to great acclaim at the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park in 1851.

He later tried to persuade the Government to install the leech jars at seaports to give storm warnings, but was met with a decidedly frosty reception from the Meteorological Department — created in 1854 and the forerunner of today’s Met Office — which insisted on using barometers and weather charts rather than leeches.

Link to Weather Eye source

[highcliffe2]

November 8, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

THIS summer, a wasp was found by local Inuits inside the Arctic Circle in Canada. The Inuit were amazed — they had never seen a wasp before because it is normally too cold for them to live that far north. In fact, there’s no Inuit word for wasp, and they had to be warned not to touch it.

This tiny sign of climate change carries profound significance. Much of the Arctic is warming up faster than anywhere else on Earth. Many roads, power lines and buildings are built on permafrost (frozen ground) which is now melting, so there is widespread subsidence, with roads cracking up and buckling into small hills and valleys.

Polar bears are running out of ice to hunt for their prey and many recently were found reduced to scavenging on sea birds’ eggs after melting sea ice left them stranded on a remote island. The Arctic Ocean is thinning so rapidly that it could be virtually ice-free during the summer in about 80 years’ time, and already the ice is so thin that the northeastern passage across the top of Siberia is close to becoming viable for shipping in summer.

The loss of ice also creates huge problems in the weather much further south, and in the future could possibly reduce rainfall in the already parched western US by up to 30 per cent.

Link to Weather Eye source

Another sign of global warming

[highcliffe2]

BY PAUL SIMONS

“A duller spectacle this earth of ours has not to show than a rainy Sunday in London.” So wrote Thomas De Quincey in Confessions of an English Opium Eater in 1822.

Sunday was not the only dull day over the past week as a depressing, drizzly gloom has shrouded the whole of Britain. In contrast to October’s string of wild and windy depressions, the weather now is becalmed by a huge anticyclone, a high pressure system anchored close by.

You might imagine that this high pressure would give clear skies and lots of sunshine, but moist air from the Atlantic has penetrated the anticyclone and become trapped, creating a low blanket of dreary grey stratocumulus cloud.

In summer, this sort of cloud layer is usually broken up by air bubbling up from the warm ground, but at this time of year the sun is much weaker and nights longer. This allows the air near the ground to grow colder than the air above — what is called a temperature inversion — trapping the moisture in stratocumulus cloud and creating so little wind that the cloud layer is left unruffled.

The anticyclone gloom hangs around until fresher air from weather fronts pushes its way through the becalmed air, or the anticyclone collapses, or it moves away.

Currently, the high pressure looks like it is happy to stay here for at least the next few days.

Link to Weather Eye source

[Paul]

Thanks Ryan, an interesting read as ever <_<

[highcliffe2]

BY PAUL SIMONS

IF IT is dark outside, look out for an aurora. Powerful solar storms have electrified the Earth’s magnetic field and set off blazing aurora lights, and much of Britain could get a grandstand view in some of the clearest skies this month.

Over the past few days, sunspots on the face of the Sun erupted with ferocious storms that blasted torrents of electrified gas into space, slamming into the Earth’s upper atmosphere and setting gases glowing in auroras — fantastic night-time views for us but highly dangerous for astronauts and satellites in space.

The solar explosions have been so intense that aurora displays were seen as far south as Canterbury on Monday night, when clouds thinned just enough to see bright green colours that, according to one report, appeared “as though someone had swept the top of the clouds with searchlights”.

The next night, an aurora over Middlesbrough was described as looking like rapid-moving green bands, and at Banchory, Aberdeenshire, an intense greenish-white glow soared high into the sky with beams of light and reddish patches of colour.

What makes these displays even more remarkable is that just a month ago the Sun was very subdued and completely free of sunspots. In fact, one solar expert thought that the Sun had slipped into a solar minimum, the quiet period of sunspot activity, which goes through a cycle of roughly 11 years.

Link to Weather Eye source

[highcliffe2]

BY PAUL SIMONS

“Autumn is a second season when every leaf is a flower” - Albert Camus

THIS autumn the changing tree leaves have put on a disappointing display, more muddy-brown than crimson or golden yellow, and the weather is to blame — grey days and mild nights have not been good for bright leaf colours.

The best colours come from lots of sunshine, mainly dry conditions, mixed with cold, but not freezing, nights. This is why maples and oaks in New England blush bright red in the brilliant sunshine and cold nights of autumn in northeast America, while the British trees tend to be much more restrained in their displays.

Trees change leaf colour because their green chlorophyll is killed off as the days grow shorter and colder, leaving behind yellow, orange and brown pigments — which are usually masked by the chlorophyll — and red anthocyanins, which are more often seen in flowers and fruit.

These autumn pigments are more than just pretty colours. They behave like a sunscreen, protecting plants from bright sunlight, and helping them to photosynthesise in the cold — hence sunny days and cool nights make the best autumn colours.

By keeping the leaves working in their last gasp of life, the trees can salvage important nutrients from them, such as nitrogen and phosphorus, to be reused the next year. When this salvage operation is finished, the leaves are ready to drop.

Link to Weather Eye source

[highcliffe2]

BY PAUL SIMONS

TOMORROW marks the 150th anniversary of a disastrous storm which struck during the Crimean War, and led eventually to scientific weather forecasts.

In the autumn of 1854, the French and British Allied forces were laying siege to the Russian port of Sebastopol on the Black Sea, when on November 14 the storm hit. “Huge waves rose up in terrifying pyramids, opening up suddenly to reveal unbelievable depths,”one witness wrote.

The Russian fleet weathered the storm anchored in port, but the Allied ships were hopelessly exposed at sea and 37 ships were wrecked. The loss of their cargo of desperately needed ammunition, food, clothing and other stores left the troops on land suffering unimaginable hardship as winter set in.

It was so disastrous that Emperor Napoleon III asked a leading astronomer and mathematician, Urbain Le Verrier, to find out what happened and how to avoid future catastrophes.

Le Verrier undertook a painstaking investigation, which revealed that the storm was a circulation of winds around a core of low pressure, and moved on a fairly steady course over some days.

With this knowledge, he realised that storms could be forecast scientifically, something never before achieved. Le Verrier established a national network of weather stations to relay weather observations to his Paris observatory, using the newly invented telegraph. Eventually he was able to collate these observations into a weather map and issue storm warnings.

Link to Weather Eye source

[highcliffe2]

BY PAUL SIMONS

WAS it my imagination, or did the air smell different this weekend? It seemed as if there were a whiff of ocean, as the blue skies and sparkling clean air gave stunning views to the horizon. That invigorating weather came from a surge of air from Greenland that charged down behind a cold front. With so little pollution, the clean polar air swept away any haze or pollution over the UK, making everything look freshly scrubbed and crystal clear.

But it came as a rude shock, once the sun set, to get nights that were cold enough to take your breath away and leave a frost over much of Britain.

The air mass from Greenland was brought down on a large anticyclone, or high- pressure system, straddling the mid-Atlantic. But as the anticyclone slipped eastwards it picked up more moisture and the skies grew dreary with a thick layer of grey stratocumulus cloud.

However, an even bigger shock may come at the end of the week, when a blast of polar air surges straight down from the Arctic on the back of a depression careering from Iceland to Scandinavia.

With a more direct route from the Arctic, this air will have far less time to warm up before it slams into the north of Scotland, which could bear the brunt of the cold and will most likely have snow showers over high ground.

Link to Weather Eye source

[kold weather]

thanks,a good read there Mrs murphymoo.

[highcliffe2]

BY PAUL SIMONS

SIXTY YEARS ago today the Americans began to attack Japan with B29 Superfortress bombers, but the air raids were hugely disappointing.

The B29s were the world’s first high-altitude bombers — capable of flying at 9km (5.7 miles) altitude, too high for enemy fighters or anti-aircraft guns — so it seemed that the air raids would be easy.

But the pilots reported problems with incredibly strong tail winds, which threw the aircraft and their bombs off course.

The target of an aircraft engine factory just outside Tokyo was left almost unscathed.

The aircraft plant was revisited seven times over the next few weeks but the raids were all disappointing — only one bomb in 50 came within 300m (1,000ft) of the target.

The mystery wind was the jet stream, a high-speed ribbon of wind that runs around the world in an easterly direction at speeds as high as 320kph (200mph) and at the altitudes at which the B29s were operating. The jet stream caused the bomber formations to be disrupted and made accurate bombing impossible.

Eventually the bombers had to fly over their targets under the jet stream, protected by fighter escorts.

The Japanese in fact knew about the jet stream and used it to launch balloons loaded with bombs to attack North America. About 1,000 of the balloons landed from Alaska to Mexico, but their impact was negligible.

Link to Weather Eye source

[highcliffe2]

BY PAUL SIMONS

A READER asked if global warming will benefit mankind by cutting heating bills in winter, saving on the use of fossil fuels (The Times, November 20).

The answer is yes — and no. Yes, our heating bills are already being reduced by milder winters, and savings of perhaps 20 per cent or more could be expected this century.

But no, any benefits could be outweighed in summer by the huge amount of power needed to cool buildings and cars during increasingly severe heatwaves.

This July, a ferocious heatwave in Italy led to the biggest electricity consumption on record, which was caused by an unprecedented use of air conditioning systems. Previous heatwaves have been blamed for power blackouts.

Air conditioning is inefficient and uses up huge amounts of energy. If electricity continues to be generated from fossil fuels, that increased power demand will pump out even more carbon dioxide, and so increase global warming.

Britain’s building industry is concerned that most of our houses will roast as indoor temperatures soar above 25C (77F), a key threshold at which people feel very uncomfortable.

Carbondioxide emissions from airconditioning in the UK have already quadrupled over the past 20 years, and the growth is likely to continue.

New houses need to be designed to be much cooler, using better natural ventilation, more shading, and denser walls and floors that can absorb heat more easily.

Link to Weather Eye source

[highcliffe2]

BY PAUL SIMONS

A VIRULENT outbreak of cholera in Soho, London, 150 years ago left more than 600 people dead and the streets deserted after the surviving residents fled their homes in terror.

For centuries it had been throught that infectious diseases such as cholera were caused by a “miasma”, or poisoned atmosphere — in fact, malaria was named after “mal aria”, meaning bad air. The point seemed proved when “a remarkable blue mist was observed which prevailed night and day” during the cholera epidemic of 1854.

But one of the local residents, a physician Dr John Snow, was convinced that cholera was spread in sewage-polluted water.

He traced the Soho outbreak to a water pump on Broadwick Street, and when he had the pump closed the spread of cholera stopped.

But despite this, Snow’s theory of water-borne disease fell on deaf ears. When another cholera outbreak hit London in 1866, James Glaisher, a leading meteorologist of the time, observed another blue mist; when the mist faded away, the epidemic weakened. It was probably a coincidence and the blue mist was just a normal haze.

There are no records of any other sightings of the blue mist since 1866, but maybe that is because no one has looked for it. Yet, the miasma theory eventually led to the construction of sewers and the end of the cholera epidemics.

Link to Weather Eye source

[highcliffe2]

BY PAUL SIMONS

NOW THAT November is drawing to a close, what was the weather like this month? The one thing that sticks out was the ferocious cold snap almost two weeks ago, when snowstorms swept down from Scotland deep into East Anglia and the Midlands.

That was followed by a rare outbreak of freezing rain, which turned many roads throughout much of northern Britain into ice rinks.

Otherwise this month has been marked out by its astounding dullness.

Day after day, leaden skies have blotted out the sun and light drizzle added to the depressing tedium.

This was thanks to long stretches of anticyclonic gloom, when blocks of high pressure trapped blankets of low, stratocumulus cloud — which explains why the amount of sunshine has been about 25 per cent below average for the month across the UK.

But that thick layer of cloud had some benefits. It kept many nights incredibly mild by trapping heat close to the ground, rather like a duvet keeps a bed warm.

Temperatures have been about 1C (1.8F) higher than normal, especially in Scotland which saw some of the most unseasonal temperatures, despite the cold spell.

Above all, the high pressure made this a ridiculously dry month, with just 50 to 75 per cent of the normal rainfall for November across the UK.

But then, after October’s rain and storms, it all came as a blessed relief.

Link to Weather Eye source

[highcliffe2]

BY PAUL SIMONS

IS PETROL set for another price rise this winter? The oil markets are looking nervously at winter forecasts for North America, because the colder the winter there, the more heating oil is used. With energy prices already at record levels, the oil price could soar even higher.

Long-range forecasting for any season is difficult at the best of times, but Siberia may hold the key to this winter. An intriguing study reveals that the more snow that falls in Siberia in October, the more likely it is that North America will get a colder winter, and to some extent Europe as well.

Siberia is the refrigerator for much of the northern hemisphere. As autumn closes in, a huge mass of cold air builds up there, and because it is so dense it reaches only a few thousand feet high and usually can’t spill over the Himalayas. Instead, if that cold air mass is big enough it can slide over the frozen North Pole into North America, or westwards into Europe.

The Siberian snow forecasting technique is still in its early development, but has scored striking successes, correctly predicting the cold in the northeastern US last winter and another cold winter in eastern US the year before.

As for this winter, Siberia had plenty of snow cover in October, so perhaps the eastern US will be heading for another cold winter.

Link to Weather Eye source

[highcliffe2]

BY PAUL SIMONS

THE extraordinary bout of hurricanes in the US this year has left a nasty legacy which could make steak, vegetarian burgers and many other foods more expensive.

A fungal disease called Asian soybean rust appeared in Louisiana this month. It is thought that the fungal spores were spread from Colombia on the battering of hurricane winds and rains in August and September (The Times, November 27).

The virulent disease is spreading rapidly into neighbouring states and could be easily swept on winds across the US. The damage it causes could send the price of soya bean foods and cattle-feed soaring.

The fungal spores spread across South America in just two years. But many other diseases also blow in the wind, often carried on clouds of Saharan dust. In 1978, an outbreak of sugarcane rust appeared in the Dominican Republic and spread rapidly through the Caribbean. The outbreak coincided with the arrival of wind-borne dust from West Africa.

Human health is also under threat from Saharan fallouts. Clouds of dust laden with bacillus bacteria have been linked to high rates of asthma, allergies and other lung ailments in Florida and the Caribbean.

In Britain, there are suspicions that the foot-and-mouth epidemic of 2001 began with a shower of Saharan dust that wafted over northeast England, washed down on a weather front.

Link to Weather Eye source

[highcliffe2]

BY PAUL SIMONS

WHAT weighs more, a pound of feathers or a pound of lead? The question is trickier than it seems because it involves the density of air, which, scientists have discovered, we have miscalculated. Air is roughly 72 per cent nitrogen, 21 per cent oxygen, and 1 per cent water vapour. The culprit of the greenhouse effect, carbon dioxide, is a mere 0.04 per cent or so.

The other major component is argon, about 0.9 per cent, but tends to get overlooked because it takes no part in any chemical reactions in the air.

Just over a century ago, the argon content of air was measured as 0.934 per cent, but revised down in 1969 to about 0.917 per cent.

However, a team from Korea and France reporting in Metrologia, the science journal, made a more accurate measurement of 0.9332 per cent, close to the 100-year-old measurements.

This may seem pedantic but it is important in making very precise measurements of mass.

The density of air affects buoyancy, which means that measured in a vacuum compared to air, the pound of feathers is lighter than lead because the air very slightly supports them.

Knowing the precise amount of argon in the air will allow scientists to measure the mass of objects in air more accurately than before.

Link to Weather Eye source

[Adi F]

Quite surprisingly I found that was a very interesting read :blink:

[Terminal Moraine]

BY PAUL SIMONS

WHAT weighs more, a pound of feathers or a pound of lead? The question is trickier than it seems because it involves the density of air, which, scientists have discovered, we have miscalculated. Air is roughly 72 per cent nitrogen, 21 per cent oxygen, and 1 per cent water vapour. The culprit of the greenhouse effect, carbon dioxide, is a mere 0.04 per cent or so.

The other major component is argon, about 0.9 per cent, but tends to get overlooked because it takes no part in any chemical reactions in the air.

Just over a century ago, the argon content of air was measured as 0.934 per cent, but revised down in 1969 to about 0.917 per cent.

However, a team from Korea and France reporting in Metrologia, the science journal, made a more accurate measurement of 0.9332 per cent, close to the 100-year-old measurements.

This may seem pedantic but it is important in making very precise measurements of mass.

The density of air affects buoyancy, which means that measured in a vacuum compared to air, the pound of feathers is lighter than lead because the air very slightly supports them.

Knowing the precise amount of argon in the air will allow scientists to measure the mass of objects in air more accurately than before.

Link to Weather Eye source

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I'm confused by the penultimate paragraph. If the feathers and the lead are measured in a vacuum, by definition there is no air so how can it slightly support the feathers?

T.M